Well built with an excellent physical keyboard. Smooth OS with great games.

Cons

No 4G. Many screens don't work in landscape mode. So-so camera. Some audio won't play over Bluetooth headsets.

Bottom Line

The HTC Arrive is a solid Windows Phone 7 for Sprint, but it's stuck in the Internet slow lane.

The HTC Arrive finally brings Windows Phone 7 to Sprint, with Microsoft's easy-to-use interface and excellent office software. It makes the cut for our list of The 10 Best Phones with Keyboards. But without 4G, this cell phone doesn't deliver the best Internet experience the carrier has to offer.

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The Arrive is a classy, businesslike phone, made of gray metal and soft-touch plastic. At 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and 6.5 ounces, it's a bit heavy, like it's made of some sort of neutron star material; that density helps it feel expensive. The front of the phone is a standard 3.6-inch, 800-by-480 LCD, but slide the screen to the right and something unusual happens: the display moves over and tilts up like a mini-laptop, revealing an excellent five-row QWERTY keyboard.

I have mixed feelings about the hinge. Sometimes it's great: it reduces glare outdoors, and indoors it lets you sit the phone up on your desk. But I worry it will get stuck over time, and the Arrive suffers from the problem all landscape-format Windows phones do. Much of the Windows Phone OS doesn't work in landscape mode, so you're left with this little laptop on your desk where the interface elementas are sideways.

The Arrive's phone performance is mixed. RF reception is downright excellent: I successfully made several calls in a very weak signal area. But while the earpiece is nice and loud, a few of my test calls were interrupted by audio artifacts, such as pops and clicks. Transmissions through the main mic were a bit blustery but perfectly understandable, with a slight hiss in the background. The speakerphone is quiet enough to be almost useless. I got 4 hours, 32 minutes of talk time, which is acceptable, but not great for a 3G phone.

Apps and Internet Experience
Windows Phone 7 has unparalleled compatibility with Microsoft office setups, including a terrific Exchange client and built-in Office document software. The Web browser isn't bad, either. So it's a pity that the Arrive's Internet speeds are so slow.

The Arrive lacks 4G WiMAX, which speeds up Net access on both Sprint's HTC Evo 4G ($199, 4 stars) and Samsung Epic 4G ($249, 4 stars) phones. But it's also slow for 3G. When I tested the Arrive directly against an Evo using the browser-based DSLReports speed test and two downloadable speed tests (Ookla on the Evo and BandWidth on the Arrive), I got noticeably slower speeds on the Arrive five out of six times, with no Arrive result higher than 663Kbps down and 510Kbps up. Sprint's other top smartphones leave this phone in the dust. At least the Arrive has Wi-Fi, and it connected easily to our WPA2-protected network.

Like all Windows Phones so far, the Arrive is based on the now-older, first generation 1GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon processor, which offers fine performance. The Arrive may be Sprint's best gaming phone, thanks to the many excellent games among the 10,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. But note that Sprint doesn't yet have any phones based on Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip, which offers superior gaming performance.

HTC, Sprint, and Microsoft have enhanced the standard Windows Phone software here with a couple of apps and one big feature: Copy and Paste. Copy and paste worked for text in every app I tried, with one caveat: you need to zoom in beyond a certain point to be able to tap on words, see them highlighted, and copy them. That can be very frustrating.

You can get several useful apps through HTC's Hub portal. There's a notepad, flashlight, graphic equalizer, photo enhancer, but most notably a very cool app called "attentive phone," which does things like increase ringer volume if the phone is in a bag and mute the ringer if you flip over the phone on a table. That's neat stuff, and should be a default feature.

Sprint's major contribution is a TeleNav-powered GPS app that locked into my location quickly and accurately, and works perfectly in landscape mode. That's a big bonus over Microsoft's Maps app, which doesn't work properly with the keyboard open.

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About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

HTC Arrive (Sprint)

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